Traversing science, politics, and technology, Our Biggest Experiment
shines a spotlight on the little-known scientists who sounded the alarm
to reveal the history behind the defining story of our age: the climate
crisis.
Our understanding of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an
extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavor. It also
began much earlier than we might think. In Our Biggest Experiment,
Alice Bell takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the point when concern
started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the "debate"
is over and the world is finally starting to face up to the reality that
things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot drier (in some places), and
a lot wetter (in others), with catastrophic consequences for most of
Earth's biomes.
Our Biggest Experiment recounts how the world became addicted to
fossil fuels, how we discovered that electricity could be a savior, and
how renewable energy is far from a twentieth-century discovery. Bell
cuts through complicated jargon and jumbles of numbers to show how we're
getting to grips with what is now the defining issue of our time. The
message she relays is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity and
intelligence that has driven the history of climate change research can
result in a more sustainable and bearable future for humanity.
